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Amit Prakash on product design

From Season 2 Ep. 16 Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions · · TheRobotBrainsPodcast

“We built a Google-like interface to be able to ask questions but behind the scenes it was a very deterministic system — you could think of it almost as a DSL factory — it feels like you're just asking questions in natural language.”

Amit Prakash
Amit Prakash
Cofounder, ThoughtSpot
product designnatural language interfacesknowledge representation

On , Amit Prakash, Cofounder at ThoughtSpot, spoke about product design during Season 2 Ep. 16 Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions on TheRobotBrainsPodcast.

Season 2 Ep. 16 Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions
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Season 2 Ep. 16 Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions
TheRobotBrainsPodcast
Watch on YouTube
Every business wants to be a data-driven business these days; basing decisions on tangible facts derived from historical precedents and clear-cut numbers. But that’s a lot easier said than done. This episode’s guest, Amit Prakash, is on a mission to change that. Based on his experience working on Microsoft’s Bing and then at Google working on Google Brain, he co-founded Thoughtspot to make querying data as easy as having a simple conversation. Thoughtspot provides artificial intelligence (AI) and search-driven analytics. The Sunnyvale, California-based company reached unicorn status in 2019, its latest valuation is $4.2B, and counts Nike, Walmart, and Apple among its clients. Amit shares the story behind building the massive search system, his views on relational search, and how to teach a machine what a user thinks is most interesting. What's in this episode: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:01:15 - Amit following in his father’s footsteps of studying in the US 00:02:26 - Journey from PhD to entrepreneur 00:05:20 - Disrupting the analytics industry 00:07:31 - ThoughtSpot’s mission 00:09:02 - The Co-founding of ThoughtSpot 00:10:38 - First product and user study 00:14:21 - Customer operations before and after ThoughtSpot 00:15:26 - Pillars of ThoughtSpot’s UX 00:24:29 - Advances and challenges of NLP 00:33:06 - Snowflake & ThoughtSpot's partnership 00:42:54 - Acquisition of SeekWell 00:44:29 - Funding journey with Lightspeed 00:45:30 - Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs 00:49:11 - Amit’s one-hour-a-day dedication to learning something new Links: Amit's Newsletter: https://prakasha.substack.com/archive Company Website: https://www.thoughtspot.com/ How the Platform works: https://bit.ly/37vOedx Company Twitter:   / thoughtspot   Forbes Profile: https://bit.ly/3OofP0J SUBSCRIBE TODAY: Apple: https://apple.co/3xDBOuT Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3uZ2Qv2 Amazon: https://amzn.to/3xHWG46 Google: https://bit.ly/3jWEADu Acast: https://bit.ly/3xGRspp Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones Production: Fresh Air Production
Amit Prakash

About Amit Prakash

Cofounder · ThoughtSpot

Amit Prakash, cofounder and CTO of ThoughtSpot, discussed the company's mission and approach to data analytics in a 2022 podcast interview. He stated that ThoughtSpot aims to "empower the people who understand the business" to query data using a "Google-like interface" that translates natural language questions into deterministic results. Prakash noted that the company chose the analytics market because it was "ripe for disruption," with many enterprises using solutions built "10–20 years ago." He also discussed the company's partnership with Snowflake and its acquisition of a company called Sequel, which operates in the reverse-ETL space. Prakash addressed the limitations of large language models like GPT for enterprise analytics, arguing that solving business-specific queries requires "structured capture of domain knowledge" rather than general real-world knowledge. He emphasized that only employees within a company understand specific business correlations, and that capturing this knowledge efficiently is key to the product's success. Prakash also credited early investor Lightspeed for their support and advised founders to "spend more time early on to get the problem right" before writing code.

Profile compiled from Amit Prakash's verified public interviews and appearances. See all quotes & transcripts →

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